City of Lies: Love, Sex, Death and the Search for Truth in Tehran

by Ramita Navai

  Taymour’s friends wanted their own sex tapes. Leyla was in business. She was charging 1,000 US dollars and upwards. The guys liked to outdo each other. She filmed on a high-rise balcony, in the back of a car, in a park and in the mountains. Most connoisseurs of local porn soon recognized the round bottom, the soft girlie voice and the big full lips as the same girl who had spread her legs so adroitly in Tehran Nights and, by now, Housewife from Shiraz. But only a handful of people knew her real identity, for the camera never went past Leyla’s mouth, which was either smiling, parted in an elongated moan, or, more usually, stretched over an erect penis.

  Kayvan was one of Tehran’s bacheh pooldars, rich kids. He wore Rolex watches that he bought on Vali Asr. He lived in a mansion with Roman pillars at the entrance and peacocks strutting in the garden. In the summer he had pool parties. In the winter he skied in Shemshak, forty-five minutes north of Tehran, where he would drink under-the-counter vodka and tonics and eat wild boar at a hip café. After the skiing season he would retreat to Dubai, the Mecca for holidaying Iranians. There he would hire breathtakingly beautiful Russian hookers.

  His father imported a famous brand of American printer with a regime-approved licence. Despite sanctions, most government offices were still buying the latest models. A deal brokered with a member of the Revolutionary Guards, the most powerful force in the country and directly answerable to the Supreme Leader, meant the printers surged into the country with the same velocity as before, through a port that also welcomed shipments of alcohol and drugs.

  Kayvan’s best friend was Behfar, whose father had made a fortune in food manufacturing. International sanctions had been excellent for business; even though prices of basic produce had shot up, demand was higher than ever; the whole family prayed for an eternal stalemate. Behfar’s father was a canny operator and had made some powerful allies in the regime, donating extravagant gifts and money for election campaigns. He had also built a spectacular mosque on Vali Asr. There was a rumour that the Supreme Leader had told him he never had to pay another penny in tax again for his services to the nation.

  Kayvan and his friends were bored and idle trust-fund kids, all in their early twenties. Their fathers’ bank accounts injected their congenital arrogance with an uninhibited confidence. The money gave them a degree of immunity, for they had learnt they could buy their way through most red tape and sticky situations. The women were as abundant as the allowances from their fathers. Cruising in his Porsche, or in Behfar’s Bugatti in the tangle of roads in his stomping ground, Fereshteh, it would take less than ten minutes to pick up a giggling teenager. He had timed it. Some would be in it for a flirt, some for sex. Nearly all, he suspected, were after a husband. But he had a particular liking for whores. The girls he used were the uptown variety, pretty girls who only wore branded goods and who cost top whack, 500 US dollars a night and upwards. He had slept with every single high-class ‘escort’ signed to an agency with an impressive client list that ran out of a small office in Gheytarieh. Not all the girls he picked up were working girls, like the ones he met in the upmarket coffee shops; but there was a tacit agreement that they expected a shopping trip to the Valentino Red boutique in the Modern Elahiyeh Shopping Center if they were to open their legs. They were so Barbie-doll perfect, it was a fair deal.

  After Kayvan watched one of Leyla’s films, he tracked her down through friends of friends. He wanted a piece of the action. He captured their first film together on his iPad for his own personal collection. He decided she was the best whore he had ever met. Unlike most of the girls he hung out with, Leyla was straight-talking and direct. There was no game-playing, none of the baby-voiced faux coyness favoured by so many Tehrani girls. Kayvan started parading her everywhere with him – parties in north Tehran, luxurious chalets in the mountains. At a rave in the ski resort of Shemshak, Leyla danced as a sea of luminous white eyeballs bobbed around her, the revellers’ coloured contact lenses picked out by the UV disco lights. The super-rich kids were a mixed-up lot; it was hard to tell who was the son of a bazaari, who was the son of a dolati, government worker, and who was old money. Sophistication could be bought for the price of a Western education and a passing knowledge of art.

  Leyla had never imagined she would experience life at the top of Tehrani society. Her need to better herself combined with her beauty had catapulted her northwards, reaching the pinnacle for every Tehrani working girl, which was as an escort to the uptown playboy circle. She dropped her regular clients like the cleric and the judge. And Kayvan no longer paid her in cash; instead he bought her whatever she wanted. It was easy to pretend she was his girlfriend.

  Tehran Nights eventually made its way to the offices of the cyberpolice. It had been picked up during a house raid and lain hidden under a pile of written statements on a police officer’s desk for a few weeks. The DVD was unmarked and the officer was about to throw it in the bin when he thought it might be his copy of The Bling Ring that he had lent a colleague. He pushed it into his laptop and Leyla’s jiggling breasts appeared. The officer thought it looked quite tame compared to the porn he liked to watch. He gave the DVD to his sergeant, who handed it to the cyberpolice.

  The fight against porn was a losing battle. The clerics were worried. The government was worried. Porn had even been discussed in parliament. A new bill was introduced that updated the law, enforcing stricter punishments, which included being found a corrupter of the earth, an executionable offence. Sex tapes were leaking out, and the cyberpolice needed to act. When the private sex tape of a soap star, Zahra Amir Ebrahimi, had exploded across the whole country, more than 100,000 DVD copies were sold on the black market. The regime was caught in a tricky situation; the actress was adored and it would not look good to come down too hard. She had also made her name by playing the pious lead character in a soap opera called Narges; she was the face of virtue and purity on state television. A celebrity sex tape was not the image the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB) had hoped for. Ebrahimi left the country and never returned.

  Even the threat of execution had done little to deter the fornicators. The courts had sentenced two people to death for running porn sites; one of them, an Iranian-born Canadian computer programmer called Saeed Malekpour, had his death sentence reduced to life imprisonment for ‘designing and moderating adult-content websites’ which went hand in hand with insulting the sanctity of Islam.

  The cyberpolice pored over hours and hours of porn films. They needed a conviction, but finding the culprits was almost impossible. The officers watched Tehran Nights several times; it looked like another amateur porn video but classier.

  *

  A girl in a catsuit with blonde pixie-cropped hair was gyrating with an Amazonian beauty wearing a sheaf of a dress slashed to her navel. Around them a group were popping ecstasy pills in each other’s mouths as they danced in front of a DJ spinning house tunes from his booth. Two famous actors were on the sofa with a group who were chopping out lines of cocaine on a glass table. The house belonged to a returned exile, notorious for her wild parties. She was an interior designer and her home was a homage to gothic style: pointed arches, black and red walls, heavy velvet curtains and six-foot wrought-iron candelabra.

  Leyla was about to take off her manteau when the hostess sprang on Kayvan.

  ‘Get that fucking jendeh out of my house. How many times have I told you before about bringing those girls here?’ She dragged Kayvan to the kitchen. Leyla stood on her own, her headscarf round her shoulders. She was unmoved by the attack, but was surprised that the hostess could tell she was a jendeh. Leyla had thought she was now assimilated well into the north Tehran set, but the hostess had trained eyes. Kayvan returned.

  ‘Sorry babe, I’ll get you a cab home.’

  This was the first time he had abandoned her.

  ‘You said we were going to a party tonight – together?’

  ‘I know, but you heard her. House rules, what can I say. I’ll call you next week.’

  �
��You fucking arsehole.’

  That night Leyla decided to leave Iran, to start a life where no one knew her.

  Leyla had always thought that marrying above her station was the only way that she could better herself, just as her sister had done. The sex films had given her an independence she never thought she would have, but it was not enough. She wanted a husband; she wanted love and a family like everyone else. Partying with Kayvan had been fun, but she had been wrong about him and her own naivety surprised her. It was obvious really: they were all happy to fuck her and even to be seen with her, but no rich kid with high-society friends would marry a whore. Even the most outwardly urbane guys who seemed so sophisticated and, well, Western, wanted to marry virgins – or at least upper-class girls who knew how to play virtuous.

  Parisa had reached the same conclusion and was now working as a prostitute in Dubai, where Iranian flesh was some of the most expensive on the market (Chinese and then African the cheapest). Parisa was now earning nearly 1,000 US dollars a night, and she was not half as striking as Leyla.

  Recently Leyla had been listening obsessively to Dr Farhang Holakouee, a Los Angeles-based celebrity agony uncle with a daily radio call-in show; his popularity had peaked a few years ago, but Leyla still tuned in. His callers were mostly Iranians living in the United States. No subject was off-limits and he tackled them all with a no-nonsense manner, doling out sensible counsel with stern impatience. Housewives and professionals from all parts of the city downloaded his show and bought his DVDs on the black market. He was anti-regime, secular and modern, and he understood the damaged Iranian psyche. He spoke of cycles of behaviour, of taking control, of cause and effect, of responsibility for your actions. A caller had phoned in to ask if changing your life was really possible: of course it is possible, first you have to face reality and then you must know that your future is in your own hands.

  Leyla knew what to do. She would save up in Dubai and then start anew in the USA. She lay awake all night, overwhelmed with this sudden urge to leave Tehran.

  *

  They came for her at six o’clock in the morning, her head still full of the plans she was making to join Parisa. She shook with fear when they put her in the back of the police car. This time she knew it was more serious.

  The officers in the cyberpolice unit had whooped with excitement when they noticed a box in the corner of the screen with a serial number on it. It was Leyla’s electricity meter. It had taken a matter of hours for them to track her down.

  She was taken straight to Evin. There was no police station, no courtroom, no lawyer. On the way, she had frantically called the judge’s number. No answer. The line was dead. She managed to send two texts before they confiscated her phone, one to Kayvan and one to the judge. I NEED HELP. POLICE HAVE GOT ME.

  Neither of them replied. Kayvan had got scared and deleted all signs of her existence from his life. The judge had died.

  Most of her cellmates were either working girls or women who had been found guilty of other moral crimes, such as adultery. The sex workers were from the streets, and at first Leyla found it hard to identify with them. She had worked hard to eliminate the memories of her Takht-e Tavous streetwalking days from her mind. Many of the girls took drugs and often fights broke out between them. Leyla won them over with gossip about her film star clients and details of lavish parties. She sold herself as the glamorous porn star headed for Dubai – what they could all be. She even comforted the women by teaching them the beautiful passages from the Koran that the cleric had taught her. The women shared with her their own stories of bouncing in and out of prison and reassured her she would be freed in no more than a few months.

  Leyla was told she would be assigned a lawyer, and that she could call her family. Her mother sobbed down the phone and said she could not bear to visit her in prison through shame. She told Leyla to call her when she was released.

  But she was not in prison long.

  It was a beautiful spring dawn when Leyla was hanged.

  six

  MORTEZA

  Imam Zadeh Hassan, south-west Tehran

  There was blood everywhere. It was smeared over faces and streaking down necks. A sticky film of it glistened viscous pink on chests; in places it had clotted deep red in tufts of hair. From each lash more droplets spurting outwards in a ruby mist.

  Morteza was standing at the back of the room, clutching a chain in his hand.

  ‘Ya Hossein!’ He was chanting the imam’s name as he watched his comrades. Forty of them were thrashing chains down on their bare backs in perfect synchronization to a hypnotic electro-techno beat.

  ‘Ya Hossein!’

  They were in a hosseinieh, the hall next to the mosque, in the south-west suburbs where Morteza had grown up. The doors were locked and the curtains were pulled. The room had been turned into a dark, dank box, lit by a few bare yellow lightbulbs on the dirty tangled wires hanging from the low ceiling. The room was fetid with sweat, blood and rose water. To his right Morteza could see Abdul slashing his head with a ghameh, a big dagger. Blood was seeping out in waves; his eyes were half shut, ecstatic with pain.

  ‘Ya Hossein!’

  One voice led them all, rising above their cries, hovering somewhere between a groan and a sublime soprano. Morteza stared at the singer on the small stage, head tilted back as if singing to God himself. It was the first time in all these years that he had really studied him. He was a bearded man in his thirties with steel-rimmed glasses and a green scarf tied round his head, Bruce Springsteen-style. A special-effect reverb on the microphone produced an ecclesiastical echo that looped over the rhythmic throb.

  ‘Ya! Ya … Ya … Ya…’

  ‘Hossein! Hossein…Hossein…Hossein…’

  ‘Ya Hossein.’ Morteza repeated the words in a flat whisper.

  It was Ashura, the ten-day festival in the Islamic holy month of Muharram that commemorates the martyrdom of the Prophet’s grandson, Imam Hossein, who was killed with seventy-two others at the battle of Karbala in 680. But this was a secret Ashura, hidden from view ever since the state banned bloodletting during the ceremonies, deeming it barbarous and fanatical. A hardcore minority ignored the edict, believing that some things are strictly between a man and his God and none of the state’s business. Violent self-flagellation where blood is a sign of love for Hossein was part of their culture, a tradition that their fathers’ fathers’ fathers had practised. These rituals simply disappeared underground, in guarded hosseiniehs and back rooms across the country. Illegality stamped the gatherings with added importance, binding the men closer together, brothers in arms. Morteza had been a part of this ritual for years, hearing the same songs in the same rooms.

  ‘Hossein went to Karbala…’ The singer broke into a sob that the microphone regurgitated and spat back out, sending the sound spinning across the room: wah wah wah wah.

  In the next breath he was deliriously upbeat, as though a different man had taken over.

  ‘Come on everybody, let’s hear it louder! Let’s put a little more into it!’ The singer now sounded like a holiday camp leader whipping up the crowd. A reminder of the forgotten sob was still reverberating as he spoke: wah wah wah…

  The men responded, jumping up now as they whipped their backs, bellowing the words as an incantation until they were all gripped in a trance.

  ‘Hossein! Hossein! Hossein! Hossein! Hossein!’

  For the first time in his life, Morteza did not join in. He just stood there, surveying the spectacle as though he had never seen it before. His comrades looked strangely like the north Tehran ravers they abhorred, lost to the rhythm of a drum, in a haze of adrenalin and cortisone instead of ecstasy and alcohol. For the first time, he found the singer’s mock sobs ridiculous. Morteza realized that even the real tears he conjured up every year were not really for God or Imam Hossein, but for himself.

  Morteza dropped his chain and fetched his coat. His friends tried to stop him leaving.

  ‘What’s happened? Wha
t’s got into you?’ They barred his exit. Morteza said nothing as he pushed through them and walked upstairs and out into the late afternoon light. On the street an official, more sedate public Ashura was on show: rows of men in black shirts softly tapping themselves with blunt chains, eyes on the women, who were more interested in the quality of the self-flagellators than the self-flagellation. A sanitized version of the real thing. Morteza weaved through the crowds, and when he had nearly overtaken the parade, he turned round and took a last look. He shook his head and walked away, knowing what had to be done.

  *

  Morteza was born a disappointment. When the midwife had pulled him out of his mother she had slapped his wrinkled face and all that had come out of his tiny pink lips was a feeble whimper. ‘You’ve got yourself a weakling. This boy’s not built for this world,’ she had said as she placed him on his mother’s breast. Morteza groped around for her teat, and even when it was shoved into his mouth he lacked the strength to suck out enough milk.

  The men in his family were built short, wide and strong. Stocky, fat babies that became strapping boys whose robust bodies rarely allowed illness to invade. Morteza’s pretty, delicate features never filled out and his slight frame only got leaner and longer. The women in the family cooed over him, drawn by his beauty – deliciously long eyelashes and a perfect, heart-shaped face. Morteza spent most of his childhood clinging to his mother’s chador.